"...collapsed on September 9th, three years to the day after the Confederacy's declaration of war against the United States, a fact not lost on the commanders on other side. With the defenses at Lynchburg overrun and Petersburg under direct threat now from both north, east and west, Lejeune had little choice but to begin consolidating his forces further south, placing his new node of command near Greensboro and re-routing reserves, including landship divisions, south of the Roanoke River and its tributary the Dan. A token force in Petersburg stayed behind to tie down Yankee forces to prevent a fighting retreat, but under a barrage of artillery, aerial attack and with the rail routes to Raleigh cut on September 20th, the city surrendered to Hall's army two days later. Virginia was, for all intents and purposes, entirely lost.
The retreat to the new Roanoke-Dan Line in mid-September was both a military success, and a political disaster. Lejeune was able to regroup behind his new and excellent defensive line with short supply trains unthreatened by Yankees from either sky or land, a condition he had not enjoyed in the entire time he had been in command of the Army of the East. But as it occurred simultaneously with the advance of Pershing's forces through Georgia, and preceded the Little March to the Sea in Alabama by a few weeks, it happened during the final six weeks of the war, when few in Charlotte were going to commend anybody for an orderly retreat with minimal losses of men or supplies. Lejeune had shown the competency for which he was famed - indeed, many would say that his ability to force the Yankees to fight for every inch of Virginia between the Rappahannock and the Roanoke through all of 1916 despite the rapidly deteriorating Confederate economy proved his talents - but he had done it when it was too late.
The fall of Savannah in early October essentially slashed the Confederacy into three pieces, with sparsely populated Florida cut off from the Carolinas and the western states by Pershing's force blasting its way across Georgia. This meant that, for all Lejeune's efforts, the leadership of the Confederacy was trapped inside the Carolinas, now threatened from both north and southwest. While North Carolina was indeed the most untouched of all the states, that was little comfort as both states were essentially besieged and the US Navy rerouted to flatten what little was left of ports such as Charleston, Wilmington and New Bern. There was little harvest to speak of and estimates suggested as many as half a million souls could starve in the Carolinas alone - it was plain as day, especially to Lejeune, that the war was lost.
Indeed, it was plain to a great many people with the exception of the President. Even Senator Martin was beginning to silently accept the inevitable, stating in a comment on the makeshift Senate floor in Charlotte's Trade Hall, "We are prisoners of these two great states, unable to leave and maneuver, with few souls left to throw at the Yankees." Disillusionment was high amongst the hundreds of thousands of starving, sick and emaciated Confederates left in the field, in the Carolinas or elsewhere; despite the very real threat from marauding Home Guardsmen, desertion tripled in September and further sextupled throughout October as men saw little point in dying in the field for what was increasingly an inevitable end, while pocketed units surrendered to Yankees and were often taken aback by the magnanimity they were shown by their equally exhausted enemies.
But in the executive's residence in Charlotte, Vardaman remained convinced that, if nothing else, a redoubt in the Carolinas could be held, behind the Savannah and Roanoke Rivers, from which the Confederacy could "make resistance so terrible that the Yankee will not dare cross in" and often wandered the halls of the manor late at night muttering to himself, occasionally even wandering Charlotte at night to speak to citizens and soldiers in the increasingly fortified but anxious war capital. "Surrender is for cowards," he declared to a befuddled Kernan and other members of the ASO in an October 1 meeting meant to persuade the President to immediately telegram a request for surrender "at current lines;" that this was the view of the commander-in-chief was disseminated only in the Carolinas, for telegram and telephone cables westwards had been cut, and Confederate forces in Texas, Alabama, and central Mississippi spent the rest of the next month and a half in alternating waves of collapse and mass surrender. Kernan, for his part, elected to head to Raleigh, unbeknownst to the administration forming a small clique of like-minded officers who were planning on crossing to Yankee lines to attempt to negotiate a secret peace behind the President's back.
Whatever Vardaman's motivations, the irony is that the Roanoke-Dan Line did, in fact, hold until the Armistice; if nothing else credits the choice of Lejeune to make Dixie's last stand and frustrate his counterpart Hall in the extreme south of Virginia for seven weeks with dwindling supplies, then that stands on its own..."
- The Last Days of the Old Confederacy: How the War Was Lost in 1916
I ended up helping to reach a class in military history a few years back which focused on the social history of war, and I found the topic fascinating!)
